Moral Judgments in U. S. History

...Neither the economic thesis about slavery nor the historic thesis that "conscience" demanded a war that was otherwise avoidable is original with the author...

...He castigates the "tyranny" of Puritan institutions and laws, and finds the "blue laws" morbid and neurotic...

...It was willingness of the heart...

...He is in no position to question the conventional homage paid to the Puritan conscience, for example, and liberally concedes that it has provided a "moral core" for American character which has endured for three centuries...

...Delineating the recurrence of the Puritan impulse in the developing frontier experience, Burlingame asserts we are able to sense in its recurrence something "sharp, acrid and unmistakable, like a familiar smell...

...It is an English critic, Sir Thomas Pownall, saying in 1783: "The genuine Liberty on which America is founded is totally and entirely a New System of Things and Men...

...its end marks the beginning of what Burlingame now calls "national conscience...

...and could Negro slavery be permitted in a society dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...

...For conscience may be taken to mean whatever the dominant groups value or condemn in any given phase of history...

...We may take Burlingame's procedure in the instance of Puritanism as typical of his approach throughout...

...The answer is plainly yes...

...These urgencies and these hopes can be more finely or felicitously phrased...

...As for the "theocracy," as it expanded it carried with it "its fasts and thanksgivings, its stocks, bilboes, pillories, ducking-stools, whipping-posts, and other equipment of the church state...

...The content of these two different consciences was not the same...

...The selection of a moral perspective might not have been worth remarking in the 19th century, but it is in the mid-20th...

...It is, in any case, not the closing courtesies of this book that require comment, but the golden opportunity somehow never seized throughout its 400 smooth pages...

...The tour begins with "moral paralysis in the gilded age," stops for a glimpse of "reform" and concludes with "the end of the American dream...

...and in that neutral sense of majoritarian judgment we should look for a history of opinion, a history of what the greater number of newspaper and book and pamphlet and pulpit "leaders" were saying and writing...

...But he has called attention to an area of American social and intellectual history that is of enormous significance...

...In an ascending curve of inspiration, Burlingame suggests that we may even discover that "such times as these may be the most pregnant...

...In trying to see the pattern of Franklin's life, Burlingame could hardly avoid the question of conscience, of moral purpose and, more broadly, of American character—as well as some speculation on the nature of the American "dream...

...The Civil War is, of course, the great divide...

...Neither the myth of invincible and incorruptible Puritan conscience nor the myth of the unendurable gloom and persecutory oppression of Puritanism in action define the true grandeur or the appalling limitations of the Puritan way of life...

...Nevertheless, it cannot help but be a kind of history of the whole enterprise, from the Puritan settlement to the present era, when "our national conscience" is confronted with the fearful prospect of "merging with an international conscience...

...The second question he believes was answered in economic fact, but without a moral appeal sufficient to quiet the consciences of either the North or the South...

...That conscience may conflict with another conscience, or the conscience on one level within the self war with the conscience at another level...

...What Burlingame hopes for is some kind of renewal...

...The plural is impressive—it has been underground so long...

...Consequently, he is ready almost casually to settle for the conventional disjunction between matter and spirit, and its invidious associations regarding moral purposes and ideals—that these must be derived from a "conscience" that is religious in inspiration and control, or else we can have nothing but the rationalization of egoistic, narrowly self-interested material desires...

...Burlingame finds that from a moral point of view "our land looks sterile enough"—this is a "morally arid interval...

...Reviewed by Adrienne Koch Department of Political Science, University of California This is an interesting attempt to sensitize readers to a somewhat fresh perspective on our history...

...And it is a modern American novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, disillusioned with much yet believing that "France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of an idea, was harder to utter...

...In the long run, Burlingame pays a high price for resting content with conventional and essentially unexamined views about fundamental questions, like the nature of human ideals and values, and their relationship to techniques of realization and control...

...There is much to be said for the special significance of "conscience" in the history of a people who deliberately constituted themselves first a nation and then a republic...

...By so concentrating on the story of the American people's persistent efforts to appraise itself, Burlingame offers the reader a far-ranging intellectual excursion into the more intimate side of our evolving civilization...

...and, clearly, judgments about the Puritan and his special way of life must connect conscience with action, beliefs with ways of expressing and translating them into daily realities, and religion with philosophy, science and the theory and practice of government...

...Burlingame accounts for the presence of "regional consciences" by citing two paramount divisive questions...

...or that the bloodthirsty conscience may be the source of brutal and inexcusable human suffering and evil...

...Was the United States a nation or merely a league of nations...

...Or is it rather that Burlingame is prepared to greet each later historic stage happily, on the basis of the preponderant evaluations made of the period by historical "authorities...

...The difficulty is obvious...

...One might anticipate that the Civil War would prove recalcitrant to Burlingame's procedure...

...It is necessary to ask: Does Burlingame's investigation into "the American conscience" presume the existence of some sort of irreconcilable dualism between the "material" story and the "spiritual" story of America's development...

...It is concerned with the more intangible, non-institutional, properly moral function of human judgment as it has approved, disapproved, recommended and denounced aspects of American change...

...He sometimes identifies the "peculiarly American disposition to seek moral reference points for American aims and deeds" with the persistence of a conscience "that has remained Puritan," a stern and righteous voice that has always spoken in critical instants, and lo...

...Religion has become "a social convention," "intellect is in the discard," and politics is "dictated by a cult of mediocrity...

...What is surprising, however, is the almost carefree manner in which Burlingame puts forward these controversial interpretations...

...But it is the whole man and the prevailing character of the community that one properly makes moral judgments about...

...the American soul has been saved again...

...That Burlingame is unable to command the third kind of study, and that he is indecisive about how he wants to employ his key term, "conscience," sums up the limitations of this study...

...The national conscience which emerged after the Civil War and "matured" in the successive phases of reappraisal, reform and growing international concern is still to be achieved in actuality and depth...

...and then we would have an essay on popular sentiment, beliefs and mores...

...But a careful reading of this always readable and sometimes exciting book produces more confusion and disappointment than a cursory one would be likely to induce...

...Is this then to be taken as a sign that America had progressed from its Puritan infancy to its Enlightened young manhood...

...and he finally asks: "Is it not possible to feel, in an hour of quiet darkness when we have turned off the television, the old forces rallying round us...

...His transition from the first to the present phase was marked by an interest in great Americans, as evidenced by his two popular biographies, published in 1955, on Henry Ford and Benjamin Franklin...

...The author concedes that chapters of his story record "mere political events the working out of economic designs or social complexes," but he insists that conscience plays a peculiar role in American history because of our characteristic compulsion to assign moral values to every major event, theory or social trend...

...But, finally, the story of "the American conscience" might mean those characteristic principles that individuate our history as a dis-criminable civilization...

...He asserts that slavery had encumbered the prosperity and progress of the South before the war came, and thus believes the view that the Civil War was a "repressible" conflict...

...The first sure sign of trouble here comes when the author stops speaking about "the American conscience" and substitutes accounts of "regional consciences...

...nor is this the place to investigate the material truth of either hypothesis...

...On such a multi-factored basis, the two conventional myths with which Burlingame operates no longer do service...

...When he passes from the Puritans to the period of the Enlightenment and the founding fathers, he shows himself as wholehearted in accepting the verdict of our political historians on the key role of this liberal temper in determining the character of our democratic experiment as he was in accepting the judgment of the religiously oriented historians in deriving "the core of American conscience" from the Puritans...

...The shift of interest from the human effects of the assembly line in mass production, let us say, to wider and more moral concerns affecting "the American soul" is a shift that carries about itself the suggestion of an antithesis...

...Even foreign critics join with American interpreters in conceding that the question of who we are and what our role must be in any context is invariably couched in moral terms...

...or even that the conscience is no separate faculty, nor a higher life without roots, but some cluster of principles born of personal and social experience, nourished by memory and literature and the pressures of changing society—these realities the author cannot quite escape, but neither can he clarify them or take them into proper account because of the superficial description of the moral terrain that he trusts as a good map...

...our guideposts are abstractions," the story of our "national conscience" is quickly told in less than one hundred pages...

...Not only does this do an injustice to the rational, humanly-dictated controls over goals and aims, and ultimately to the nature of the human self, but it results in a rigid worship of "conscience," as if whatever "the" conscience dictates or exhorts is ipso facto right and good...

...and this involves, in addition to all the scholarly controls, a considerable element of choice and decision about what is important and what is relatively minor...

...nor political theocracy (which, as a good democrat, he rejects), nor legal intolerance (which he despises...

...The fatal flaw of not deciding how to use the cardinal term "conscience" gives this work its amorphous and ultimately deceptive cast...

...Or the story of conscience might mean, not necessarily what the leaders said or implied, but what the people, in their literature, their songs, their folk sayings, in their letters and conversations revealed that they believed...

...When the author writes lyrically of the men who had a "passion for liberty" and who wrote their enlightened philosophy into the Declaration of Independence, he is plainly approving of a secular, humanistic ideal which is in rebellion against what he impatiently calls the "doctrinal mists of the Reformation...

...and the rough, whisky-drinking, "lonesick" Westerner becomes the bearer of a "passionate effort to maintain and nurture the equality concept...

...He attempts with conspicuous courage to answer both questions...

...One can only say that, while the professional historian will shudder at this license, readers who have not been debauched by learning can maintain their rapid-reading pace...

...Burlingame's major studies, previous to this book, have been: March of the Iron Men, Engines of Democracy and Backgrounds of Power...

...Apparently the conscience to which Burlingame is prepared to bow is not lo be correlated with personal meddlesomeness (which he deplores...

...The frontier is gone...

...The Puritan "core" of conscience and character, and the tolerant, rational humanism of philosopher-statesmen like Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, are substantially different in outlook...

...Oddly enough, this near-miraculous role assigned to the Puritan conscience is never squared with the author's conscientious distaste for Puritanism, which he also expresses...

...The Puritan voice may again speak and save us, although there is no discussion of how...

...but perhaps, he proposes, it lurks in some area of the human mind...

...One way of divining what is meant by this last is the author's closing caution that "the American destiny is no longer manifest...

...Since, as he somewhere remarks, "We live by slogans...

...As we read on, to the phase of the frontier, the Turner thesis becomes uppermost...

...The "national conscience" may come to terms with the need to cooperate in world problems, and create thereby a "public sense of right and wrong that has no sectional boundaries...

...It is also interesting that the author has apparently come to see the significance of moral purpose and judgment after he has devoted intensive study to phases of developing industrialization in America...

...He seems, first, to have been taken with the imaginative power of the material basis of American civilization, while he is now apparently trying to focus on what he tends to abstract as "the" conscience of America...

...but by and large they are the general hope, although some of us would stress creative and new as well as "old" forces...

...This third use of "conscience" also requires responsible interpretation, based on a rare blend of scientific-hypothetical reasoning with the art of historical and philosophic vision...

...The sad truth is that Burlingame wants to tell a bold new story without the pain of tough new analytical work—that he is more ambitious than his intellectual stamina warrants...

...The first question he believes was answered "in fact" through the integrating forces of communications, industry and commerce in a nationally interdependent network...